After winning the first round of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop design competition in March of this year, the team of 30 MIT graduate students, 14 of which are in MechE, spent much of their free time over the past two months building their pod. The team, which is also comprised of students from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Sloan School of Management, is organized into five sub teams, focused on aerodynamics and structures, levitation, vehicle dynamics, electronics and software, and business and marketing. Employing magnets for braking, levitation, and lateral control, the team’s main goal, in addition to proving their design’s viability, is to demonstrate the scalability of the technology. Along with their advisor, Professor Doug Hart, the team of students will travel to Los Angeles at the end of the summer to showcase their pod on the Hyperloop track at SpaceX for the ultimate phase of the competition.